Dialogue: Terrace living deprives young of backyard joys

When JENNY LYNCH* was growing up, happiness was a back garden to roam in. But where, she asks, will children in the new state houses play?

The photographs of terrace housing which ran on the back page of the Herald tell a vivid story. But one that at first glance could be deceptive.

For the identical dwellings with their tiny, fenced backyards were not, as might be thought, from a depressed area of Manchester or Birmingham. Instead, they represent the very latest in state housing for low-income families in Avondale, Auckland.

What on earth are we coming to?

Society is supposed to have moved forward. But if that's all hard-up families can expect in the year 2000, I am glad I grew up in less enlightened times.

I was reared in a low-income family. My father's meagre wage as a repairman for the Auckland Electric Power Board in the 1940s could have qualified us for a state house. Believe it or not, sturdily constructed state houses, with their indoor plumbing and generous gardens, were much sought after at the time.

However, family considerations meant that Mother and Dad opted to pool resources with my grandparents and share the old folks' early-20th-century home.

In terms of mod cons, our living conditions left a lot to be desired. Initially, there was no refrigerator, telephone, electric stove, hot running water, laundry or indoor toilet. A safe served to keep meat and butter cool and a black coal range provided the wherewithal for family meals.

Bath days - not exactly frequent by modern standards - meant lighting the califont, a fearsome, gas-powered monster that roared like an enraged bull, and washday called for boiling up the copper in the wash-house out the back. As for the lavatory - well, suffice to say, for some years potties under the bed did essential back-up duty.

My sister and I wore home-sewn clothes, often made from relatives' cast-offs, and when we outgrew our jumpers and cardigans Mother unravelled the wool and used it again. Shoes with holes survived their use-by date with the addition of cardboard inners and an application of varnish to the sole. Likewise, pressure on growing feet was alleviated with a little judicious cutting at the front end, thus allowing big toes to escape and turning regular shoes into toe-peepers.

As for toys, our battered dolls - composition heads with rag bodies - were a sparse and motley lot by modern standards.

Radio provided the main home entertainment. On Sunday evenings our extended family gathered around the old Gulbransen to listen to Randy Stone's Nightbeat, while morning serials such as Hagen's Circus and Portia Faces Life helped my sister and me to relieve the tedium of enduring the inevitable childhood illnesses of measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough.

A drab and deprived existence? Not a bit of it. On the whole, I remember my childhood as a happy time. Aside from the warmth of family ties, two things made it so: an abundance of food and wonderful places to play.

Along with neighbouring properties, our larger-than-average section boasted a substantial vegetable garden. Potatoes, kumara, peas, beans, pumpkin, marrow, cabbage, cauli, lettuce and tomatoes - Father grew them all. In addition, a dozen chooks kept us supplied with eggs (and the occasional meal), and apple, plum, peach, guava and citrus trees ensured we never ran short of fruit, fresh, preserved or as jam.

My mother and grandmother served up plain fare. They had little opportunity to do otherwise. Not for families of the 40s and early 50s the often costly temptations of the supermarket. Grocery stores stocked only the basics. Cheese, for instance, came in two types: Chesdale and tasty. And provided you could stomach tripe, brains and the like, you had little chance of blowing the budget at the butcher shop.

Takeaways other than meat pies and fish and chips (which were considered, along with lollies, to be "bad for children" and thus limited to special treats) were non-existent.

Puddings, however, were deemed essential fare for growing girls. How my sister and I loved our golden syrup puds, apple pies and jam roly-polys.

Our garden was our playground, a magical place. What fun we had building cubby houses in the shrubbery, climbing trees, doing hand-stands against the hedge, soaring skywards on the swing attached to a sturdy rhododendron branch, practising cricket shots on the lawn ...

Which is where the Herald photographs come in. I looked at the picture of those tiny backyards with dismay. Where on earth do the children of the Avondale complex play? In the street?

I am not naive. I realise in Auckland, at least, the traditional quarter-acre section is virtually a thing of the past. Land these days is at a premium. And, in any case, with both parents working, many families don't want lawns and gardens. Nevertheless, there must be a better solution to the provision of low-cost housing than these sad little hutches.

What happened to all the state houses said to be empty before the last election? Could not Housing New Zealand be buying up and renovating more existing properties? If new houses are to be built, surely they should be more spacious and in much smaller groupings.

I feel for the children in the jammed-together developments. It is sad to think that such youngsters will never know the playtime delights of a decent backyard, or experience the joy of biting into crisp, new-season apples from their very own apple tree.

* Jenny Lynch is an Auckland journalist.